Midnight in St. Petersburg: A Novel of the Invisible War

by Barbara J. Webb

  “Concentrate on that,” he said.

  “On what?”

  “This!” He wrenched her hand higher, squeezed it hard enough the beads dug painfully into her skin, then let go. “On keeping that thing away from us.”

  Rose didn’t want the fairy to come close. She very much didn’t want the fairy to come close. She thought about that, long and hard. Tried to push that thought out through her fingers, into the warm, glowing crucifix that dangled from her fist.

  Mike lifted his hands and the tiny glass fragments from the window Nazeem had shattered swept across the floor. They rose into the air, began to circle, a terrible, glittering whirlwind. It surrounded the fairy, tearing at his clothes and his skin, until the spinning air misted red.

  “Ian!” Mike yelled. “Close ranks!” Mike pointed a hand towards the iron spike Nazeem had dropped and with a gesture sent it flying towards Ian’s opponent. The knight deflected it with languid ease, knocking it aside with his sword, but the distraction was enough for Ian to disengage and run towards Mike and Rose.

  Ian ran into the glowing circle of Mike’s crucifix just as the closer fairy ran his hand down his bloody face then clenched the hilt of his sword, still driven into the floor. Unlike when Mike did magic, Rose could feel the pressure building against her skull as the knight called power. The glass shards exploded out from him, peppering Nazeem and the dogs, shattering to dust on the walls and ceiling. Nothing touched Rose or Ian or Mike.

  The knight came towards them, and Rose thought furiously, over and over, Get away get away get away. The rosary stayed bright and the fairy had to back down from the light.

  Behind her, Mike said, “Get rid of them, Irish.”

  “Working on it!” Ian snapped. He sounded annoyed. Felt confused. None of it sat right on Ian.

  “What’s wrong?” Rose broke her mental litany to ask. “Ian, what’s not right here?”

  “Nothing is right here.” The second fairy man approached and Mike’s hand joined Rose’s again over the rosary. “These are powerful folk—too powerful to be on this side of the curtain. The woman we saw before, she was broken somehow and that made more sense, but these…I can’t banish them. I don’t know how, since they shouldn’t be here at all.”

  Cruel amusement radiated from the fairies, disorienting in its intensity. “Lord Pyotr has made a home for us here. You,” the knight who had been fighting Ian pointed at him, “blood traitor—” The fairy stopped abruptly and sniffed the air. He trailed a finger down his sword, then tasted the blood he found there.

  This time, the confusion and—yes, she was sure of it—fear came from the fairy. He leaned over, whispered to his companion, then raised his sword to point at Mike’s ball of light. The light flared, became blinding. Rose covered her eyes, squeezed them shut. Mike swore and the light went away. When Rose opened her eyes and looked around, the fairies—all of them—were gone.

  * * *

  Before Mike could move to stop her, Rose rushed over to Nazeem. He stood, head down, drenched in blood. His eerie stillness, in the wake of the chaotic fight, disturbed her enough she reached out without thinking.

  Nazeem flinched back. His head lifted and Rose felt a paralyzing anger burn through her. Too late, she realized she still held Mike’s rosary. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and threw the offending object aside.

  “Rose!” Mike’s sharp rebuke came from behind.

  Nazeem took several long, slow breaths—what could only be an attempt to calm himself—and his anger and pain receded. “I am all right. You needn’t be concerned.”

  “You’re absolutely not all right.” His clothes were blood-soaked rags; the places the dogs had torn into him were as obvious as they were ugly. “You need help.”

  “He’s not human any more.” Mike had moved to stare up at the rotunda, surveying the damage Nazeem had done falling from the roof. “The faster you figure that out, the better off we’re all going to be.”

  Rose’s own rage was staring to flare, driving back the fear that had tried to strangle her. “Is that why you just abandoned him? Why you let those, those things pile on him without any help?”

  “Rose.” Despite the blood still dripping from his body and the pain that throbbed through him, Nazeem’s voice was steady as steel. “Michael acted correctly. I am not as delicate as the rest of you. Nor can I take advantage of certain…protections.”

  The crosses, he meant. Embarrassment warmed Rose’s cheeks. Which only stoked her anger. “But he just left you out there.” She pointed at Mike. “I saw that trick you did with the iron spike, flying it around at the fairies. You could just as easily have stabbed it into those hounds first, to help him out.”

  “I did what I had to do. Nazeem was fine. I knew Nazeem would continue to be fine. Ian needed help, and we all needed Ian’s help.” Mike frowned and looked back at Ian, who still stood quiet and thoughtful in the same place he’d ended the fight. “Which reminds me—what the hell happened there, Irish?”

  Calm had settled over Ian while Rose wasn’t paying attention, and it smothered some of her own fear-driven anger. “This faelock—Pyotr, I guess—he’s like nothing I’ve seen before. Nothing I’ve even heard of before. He’s more powerful than he should be, commands the folk in ways he shouldn’t be able to.”

  Ian sheathed his bloody sword. “Rose says this cathedral is wrong in ways she’s never seen. The vampires are jumpy and breaking their own rules.” He looked over at Mike. “What the hell is wrong with this city?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mike said.

  Rose found herself less comfortable with Mike’s admission than she would have predicted. A few days ago, she would have loved nothing more than to find a chink in Mike’s been-there-done-that attitude, but now, surrounded by the threatening darkness on a floor coated in blood, the idea Mike might be as over his head as the rest of them—that there might never be a time when you learned enough about this business to navigate it safely—was chilling.

  For the first time, it occurred to Rose that maybe they weren’t being paid enough. “So what do we do?”

  Mike held out his hand and his rosary came flying into his palm. “Right now, we go back to the hotel and we get some sleep. There hasn’t been enough of that the last few days and the last thing we need is to be making exhaustion-related mistakes. As for the rest….”

  He called another light, looked around at the mess they’d created in the cathedral. “Tomorrow is Friday. We’ve been here less than a week. We’ve been rushing along, stumbling from one thing to the next. It’s possible there’s something we’ve missed or overlooked.” He paused. “Or been deliberately distracted from.”

  An ominous thought, but Rose was simply too tired to try to parse it out this second. “I just hope our employers thought to put someone on retainer for clean-up.”

  “We’re done for tonight.” Mike doused his light.

  Outside, Todor waited exactly as they’d left him. Which made one thing that had gone right. “What are you going to do with him?” Rose asked.

  “I guess I’ll bring him back to my room,” Ian answered. “He could be useful later. I’ll stick him in a circle so he shouldn’t be too disruptive.”

  They drew stares from the desk clerk, tramping through the lobby, bleeding and exhausted. Todor’s invisible presence sent agitated ripples through guests and staff alike, but the domovoi followed Ian into his room docilely enough.

  Rose followed Nazeem to his room. Tonight, she refused to be put off. Either he recognized that or he was too tired to argue and he let her in without comment. “You’re hurt,” she said in a flat voice once they were alone.

  “Yes,” he answered, mimicking her tone.

  What was wrong with these people? All three of her teammates, it was like pulling teeth to get information. “Are you sneaking off to the Winter Palace again?”

  A full-length mirror in a heavy gold frame hung in the short hallway between the living room and the bedroom. Naze
em stood in front of it and gingerly pulled his torn shirt away from the ugly gash in his side. Mike was right that vampires weren’t the same as normal people—no mere mortal would still be walking around with such an injury. Not to mention the smaller bites and slashes that covered his arms and the self-inflicted hole in his thigh.

  “Doesn’t that hurt?” Rose hated that she had to ask. That she hadn’t been able to isolate pain from the kaleidoscopic whirl of Nazeem’s emotions.

  “Of course,” he answered. “But I will live.” He peeled off his jacket, frowned at the tattered, bloody leather. “I will not be going out tonight, so you needn’t…chaperone.”

  Rose wasn’t an expert, but he seemed a lot worse off tonight than he had after the fight in the tunnel. All that blood—“You sure? You don’t look good.”

  His tight smile came with a now-familiar pulse of amusement. “Thank you.”

  Rose refused to be distracted. “Don’t you need…you know…to get better?”

  “Yes,” he answered, simply and honestly. “But I wouldn’t trust my welcome at the Winter Palace right now.”

  Slowly—ever so slowly—Rose was parsing out the complicated counter-resonances of Nazeem. Enough that she could recognize the hints of discomfort and confusion when he mentioned the palace. “That business the other night, you never really explained what was going on. I got that the vampires were breaking some rules, and that you didn’t think Anastasia should get to be mad at what we did, but can she really—I mean, can she really tell you no if you go to her for help right now?”

  “She can. Of course she can.” He risked another light touch to his side. “I need to clean up.” When Rose opened her mouth to object, he held up a hand. “I promise, I will answer your questions. Just let me shower and change.”

  That sounded fair. “Okay, sure. I’ll be in my room.”

  * * *

  Rose wasn’t covered in blood, but St. Isaac’s had left her coated in an emotional film of greasy gloom. It wasn’t the sort of thing that scrubbed away in the shower, but that didn’t stop her from trying. After that, an old, wash-softened pair of sweatpants and the fluffy, hotel-provided bathrobe seemed the only options for comfort. Not the sexiest outfit ever for receiving strangely attractive vampires in her room, but Rose was past the point of caring.

  Nazeem’s knock came just as Rose finished dragging a comb through her hair. “I’m sorry,” he said when she opened the door. “I can return after you’ve had time to dress.”

  “I’m as dressed as I’m going to get tonight. Come on in.”

  Without thinking about how it might look, Rose went straight for the bedroom. Nazeem stopped in the doorway and burned confusion and what might be disapproval. After the night they’d all had, Rose didn’t care. “The circle.” Rose pointed at circle charred into her rug. The circle she and Nazeem could see, but that was hidden to the hotel staff. “It’s better when I’m inside it. Especially after any time inside St. Isaac’s.”

  “Of course.” Nazeem had cleaned up and fresh clothes hid his injuries, but he couldn’t hide the gray cast to his skin or the tilted way he stood, favoring his injured side.

  Rose scooted herself back against the headboard and and stretched her legs out. “You look like you’re going to fall over. Come sit down. There’s room.”

  “Father Mike would not approve,” Nazeem said in a dry voice, with the familiar wash of his amusement behind it. But he accepted her invitation, settling in at the foot of the bed, legs crossed and facing her..

  “Father Mike can bite me.”

  Nazeem’s sharp look and the hint of a smile sent a shiver through Rose as it occurred to her she should be more careful using that phrase. Some people in the room just might want to follow through on an invitation like that. “Are you—when you’re hurt, is it harder not to…?” Why was this so difficult to talk about?

  Fortunately, Nazeem knew what she meant. He radiated the usual waspy discomfort, but filtered through a resigned slump of his shoulders and a bearing overall more relaxed than Rose had seen him so far. “It isn’t like that. We do not,” he paused to consider his words. “In many vampire stories—“

  Rose’s eyebrows went up. Her expression amused Nazeem. The warmth of it reached out to her like a caress. “Yes,” he said, the hint of a laugh in his voice. “Every vampire reads the stories sooner or later. Both the horrific and the romantic.”

  “I imagine it’s hard to resist. The way it’s hard to walk past a mirror without looking to see yourself.”

  “Precisely. Invariably, those stories are full of vampires listening to pulses and driven half-mad by the scent of blood and other nonsense. It isn’t…it isn’t like that.”

  “So you never get hungry?” Rose felt comfortable enough to tease.

  “Not in the way you’re thinking. Perhaps better to say, there is no connection between our physical need for sustenance and any cravings that develop.” He looked away, agitated again. “So you needn’t fear that in my injured state I will be overcome with the need to assault you.”

  “Which puts you three steps above my homecoming date.”

  It was the right thing to say, the joke. Nazeem relaxed again. But Rose was ready to change the subject. “So tell me about Anastasia and why she scares you.”

  “She’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  “There seems to be a lot of that going around.”

  This time, he didn’t smile. Nazeem had turned serious. “I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what I’m saying.”

  “Of course I don’t,” Rose snapped. “How would I? You won’t tell me anything.”

  “Hush.” He laid a hand on her ankle. “Let me talk.”

  His skin was feverishly hot against hers. Nazeem was always warm, but tonight it felt like something inside him was burning. Because of his injuries? This was probably the wrong time to ask.

  “I’ve killed a great many vampires,” he said without removing his hand. “More than Father Mike, I’m certain. I say this not to boast, but so you can have some sense of my experience in these matters. When I say Anastasia is like no vampire I’ve ever seen, I say that as someone who has faced down a number of the oldest and most dangerous of our kind.”

  The idea of Nazeem as a murderer on that scale—it was hard for Rose to reconcile with the man sitting quietly on her bed. “So you’re a vampire who hunts other vampires?”

  “Not exactly.” This topic, at least, didn’t make him uncomfortable.

  Rose wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or not.

  “I told you we don’t kill people anymore. I’m sure you’ve put together by now the fact that wasn’t always the case. There was, I suppose you could call it a coup, although that implies a centralized leadership that never existed. A number of vampires—of which Carter Wentworth was one—declared there would be a new order. New rules. Any vampire who wouldn’t submit would be executed. I was one of the vampires charged with enforcing this new law.”

  “So you’re like a vampire cop.”

  “Nothing so benign.” For a moment, it seemed Nazeem was going to leave it there, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry. That was evasive. You deserve honesty, if we are to be a team.

  “I was an assassin. There’s no more noble word I can give it. I was not arresting those vampires who couldn’t change. I didn’t confront them or offer them the opportunity to explain or apologize. I killed them whatever way I could find.”

  Now he waited. For rejection? For censure? Rose wasn’t sure how she felt. Except, “Those vampires you’re talking about—they’re the ones like Mike believes in. The ones who kill people?”

  Nazeem nodded.

  Mike had enjoyed killing that vampire last night. He’d been proud of himself, so jazzed up he’d gone looking for another fight, another chance to kill. Nazeem showed none of that excitement, none of that joy in the killing. He wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done, but he wasn’t exactly proud of it either.

  Which o
f them was the monster?

  “Didn’t your people know Anastasia was still letting her vampires hunt the streets? Why hasn’t someone come after her?”

  “We didn’t know.” Buzzing discomfort. That scared Rose more than anything—the fact Nazeem was that nervous about her. “We didn’t know there were any vampires in this city at all.”

  “Wentworth never mentioned his new job to anyone?”

  Nazeem’s tone was soft and dangerous as he answered, “He did not.”

  If Wentworth wanted to be a threat, he was just going to have to get in line. “Is it possible he just found Anastasia and didn’t have any more idea what to do about her than you do?”

  “He should have told someone. She’s a danger, even if she bears no ill intent. There are stories of vampires like her, ancient stories. Xolotl. Set. Kali. They’re remembered as gods.”

  “And not the friendly kind.” Rose sighed and rubbed her eyes. This was all too much to think about. “What happens if Mike pushes her too far?”

  “We must try to make certain that doesn’t happen.” On that cheery thought, Nazeem stood. “Enough lessoning for tonight.”

  Rose got up to walk him to the door. As she stepped out of Ian’s circle, the sudden assault of St. Petersburg battered against her exhausted mind. She gasped and swayed.

  Nazeem was at her side instantly, an arm around her waist, but she pushed him away. “I’m fine.”

  “This city—are you sure it’s good for you to stay?”

  “Are you sure it’s good for you to go without blood?” she answered back, sharper than she meant to. Nazeem moved a step back, withdrawing, but Rose caught his hand. “Look, let’s both trust that each of us knows how to take care of ourselves. That’ll save a lot of arguments.”